The Fertility of the Unfit eBook

It is the purpose of this work to attempt to describe
a method that will help to bring about this end.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER IX.

THE MULTIPLICATION OF THE UNFIT IN RELATION TO THE
STATE.

Ancient methods of preventing the fertility of
the unfit.—­Christian sentiment suppressed
inhuman practices—­Christian care brings
many defectives to the child-bearing period of life.—­The
association of mental and physical defects.—­Who
are the unfit.—­The tendency of relatives
to cast their degenerate kinsfolk on the State.—­Our
social conditions manufacture defectives and foster
their fertility.—­The only moral force that
limits families is inhibition with prudence.—­Defective
self-control transmitted hereditarily. Dr. Mac
Gregorys cases.—­The transmission of insanity.—­Celibacy
of the insane is the prophylaxis of insanity in the
race.—­The environment of the unfit.—­Defectives
snatched from Nature’s clutch.—­At
the age of maturity they are left to propogate their
kind.

THE humanitarian spirit, born 1900 years ago, effectually
checked all inhuman practices for disposal of the unfit.
Christ is the Author of this spirit. The noisy
triumph of His persecutors had scarcely died away
before His conception of the sanctity of human life
found expression in the mission of those Roman maidens
who in His name devoted their lives to collecting
exposed infants from the environs of their city—­that
they might rear and educate them and bring them to
the Church.

Not only has it done this, but it has taught society
that its first and highest duty is to its weaker brethren,
who constitute the unfit. All our modern institutions
are based on this sentiment, and what is the result?
Weaklings are born into the world and the weaker they
are the more carefully are they tended and nursed.
The law of the struggle for existence, i.e.,
the law of Justice is suspended or modified, and the
unfit are allowed to live, or at least allowed to live
a little longer, long enough indeed to propagate their
kind.

Hospitals and Homes and Charitable institutions all
combine their energies, and direct their efforts to
nurture those whom the laws of nature decree should
die.

Sympathy and not indignation is aroused when a defective
is born, and the result of all the effort which that
sympathy evokes is that the little weakling and thousands
such are safely led and tended all the way to the
child-bearing period of life, only to repeat their
history, in others.

Not only do defects “run in families,”
but they run in groups, and a physical defect such
as club-foot, cleft palate, or any arrested development,
is apt to be associated with some mental defect, and
it is the mental more than the physical defects of
individuals that prevent them being self-supporting
helpful members of society.

In the “North American Review” for August,
1903, Sir John Gorst declares that:—­